I am a research director – social scientist, data scientist, community-engaged scholar, and administrator – and faculty member with 20+ years of experience teaching, leading, and managing research and data science teams.
I work as the Director of Equitable Analysis in The Equity Center at the University of Virginia working with an amazing collection of scholars and practitioners, community experts, and students to create analysis and tools in support of a more just and equitable region. And I teach in the Batten School of Leadership in Public Policy, focusing on data ethics, public interest technology, and equitable policy.
I have been fortunate to engage in a wide variety of work – as a political science professor and quantitative scholar at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Virginia; as a data scientist engaged in applied work with the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service; as a consultant and leader creating UVA’s StatLab; as a library director building Research Data Services and the Social, Natural, and Engineering Sciences; and as a researcher bridging applied and academic interests with community partners and advocates.
And I’ve been grateful to find many generous and creative partners along the way who’ve invited me to be part of collaborative work. Current partners include:
- Community Policy, Analytics, and Strategy Lab (CommPAS), co-directing a community-oriented research initiative with Paul Martin in the Batten School of Public Policy and the UVA StatLab,
- Public Interest Data Lab, leading a curricular lab in the Batten School of Public Policy designed to provide data science experience to students oriented towards justice,
- The Global Policy Center’s Humanitarian Collaborative, working with David Leblang on on predictive analytics for humanitarian goals,
My own work centers on action-based research, using the tools of data science to promote accountable governance, make visible racial and other social inequities, and impact public policy and movement building. More importantly, I hope I’m mentoring the incredible young people I get to work with at UVA to engage this work early in their careers.
Also, sometimes I play the mandolin, pretend I’m learning to play the banjo, and harbor a dream of joining a home-grown bluegrass band!
Research Projects
More academically-oriented projects.
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An empirical examination of the relationship between the historical occurrence of racial violence and Confederate memorializaitons.
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Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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Co-authored with Kyshia Henderson, Samuel Powers, Jazmin L. Brown-Iannuzzi, and Sophie Trawalter
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Working to build and evaluate models of displacement that can be of use in humanitarian response.
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Part of UVA’s Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy’s Global Policy Center, in partnership with Save the Children, International.
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An ongoing research effort to record decades of thoughtful and bold calls for racial equity written by students, faculty, and staff at the University of Virginia, to analyze them for common themes, and to create an interactive library to advance the conversation.
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A collaboration between the UVA Equity Center and the President’s Racial Equity Task Force.
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Re-imagining UVA as a place where first generation and lower income students thrive
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Working with first-gen and low-income students to create research and knowledge for advocacy and change.
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Developing new ways for the public to engage political news, one that allows people to monitor the activities and attentions of government from a relatively high level, that encourages the consumption of information from multiple and varied sources, and that lowers the barriers to attentive citizenship in ways that reduce inequalities in time, education, and access.
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In other words, using machine learning to promote collective civic capacity. Here’s an early presentation: https://datafordemocracy.github.io/engagingnews/index.html
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My book (University of Illinois Press 2011) examines how citizens learn and use accountability standards during presidential campaigns.
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- Hearing Campaign Appeals: The Accountability Implications of Campaign Tone. Political Communication 29: 64-85.
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- Making a Connection: Repetition and Priming in Campaigns. Journal of Politics 70: 1142-1159.
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Investigating the causes and consequences of citizen participation in electoral systems.
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- Citizen Participation and Congressional Responsiveness: New Evidence for Why Participation Matters. Legislative Studies Quarterly 38: 59-82. With Paul Martin.
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- Creating Constituencies: Presidential Campaigns, the Scope of Conflict, and Selective Mobilization. Political Behavior 34: 27-56. With Paul Martin.
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- Gender Differences in Citizen-Level Democratic Citizenship: Evidence from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. IPSA 2000, MPSA 2001, CSES 2002. With Virginia Sapiro.
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Examining the production of social capital and how social capital promotes policy accountability.
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- The Third Face of Social Capital: How membership in Voluntary Associations Improves Policy Accountability. Political Research Quarterly 60: 192-201. With Paul Martin.
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- Trusting and Joining: An Empirical Test of the Reciprocal Nature of Social Capital. Political Behavior 22: 267-291. With Paul Martin.
Workshops and Instruction
A few examples of workshops, instructional blog posts, and other projects and materials created as educational resources.
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Over the course of the semester, we develop a roadmap for equitable policy evaluation – in problem identification and formulation, interventions and analysis, and implementation and evaluation. Through team-based projects focusing on policies targeted at the challenges faced by different populations and people, we generate concrete examples of what such a process could look like across domains.
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This short course is a 5-week introduction to the principles and tools of data visualization – we explore multiple approaches to understand, present and communicate about data – with some side trips into data wrangling and processing.
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A multi-part example of text analysis in R
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Examining the comments submitted to UVA’s new president’s Ours to Shape website.
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We partnered with UVA’s new PhD Plus program to create a six-session series to build data analysis, wrangling, and visualization skills
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And used the opportunity to dig deeper into Albemarle County Real Estate data as part of an ongoing partnership with the County.
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Contributions to our UVA Library Data Workshop series
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Including data wrangling, linear modeling, text as data (sentiment analysis, topic modeling, classification), survival analysis, matching methods, mulitiple imputation, cluster analysis, mixed-effects models
Library Projects
Projects done on behalf of library units and intiatives.
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A dashboard describing the work of the UVA Library’s Research Data Services and Social, Natural, and Engineering Sciences teams.
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To better understand usage patterns and costs of big deal journal packages, we’ve begun to analyze data on the number of articles downloaded from a given journal as well as metrics on the the number of articles published by UVA authors, the number of citations to a journal by UVA authors, and the the number of articles available via open-access.
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Part of our prepration for the impending “big deal” negotiations.
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A pilot study using aggregated log data from wifi access points in library buildings to investigate the number of unique visitors to library spaces as well as the timing, duration, and characteristics of visitors.
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And we’re using it now as background data in conversations about re-opening library spaces for the upcoming COVID fall.
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Budget model forecasts to support library administration as we move to a responsibility-centered budget model.